Charles Petzold

Another month has gone by and it’s time to consolidate my recent Facebook posts on women composers into a more convenient format. One of my favorite activities is plunging into YouTube and exploring the music performances that can be found there, and it gets more exciting when the composers of this music are still active and still composing. I’ve seen some music of these composers in concert, and I hope to see much more in the years ahead.

All blog entries on women composers have now been consolidated in the new web site Women Composing.

This blog entry is the fifth of a series. The first four blog installments are:

Here’s another group of 30 composers, with birthyears from 1972 through 1982:

Gabriela Lena Frank (born 1972)

Gabriela Lena Frank was born in Berkeley, California, to a Peruvian/Chinese mother and a Lithuanian/Jewish father. She earned B.A. and M.A. degrees from Rice University in Houston, and a D.M.A. in composition from the University of Michigan.

In 2017 she founded the Gabriela Lena Frank Creative Academy of Music (GLFCAM) to support other composers and performers. That website states about the founder:

Gabriela explores her multicultural heritage through her compositions. Inspired by the works of Bela Bartók and Alberto Ginastera, Gabriela has traveled extensively throughout South America in creative exploration. Her music often reflects not only her own personal experience as a multi-racial Latina, but also refract her studies of Latin American cultures, incorporating poetry, mythology, and native musical styles into a western classical framework that is uniquely her own.

Gabriela Lena Frank originally composed her Leyendas: An Andean Walkabout for string quartet in 2001 but here is the 2003 string orchestra version.

She has written

Leyendas: An Andean Walkabout draws inspiration from the idea of mestizaje as envisioned by Peruvian writer José María Arguedas, where cultures can coexist without the subjugation of one by the other. As such, this piece mixes elements from the western classical and Andean folk music traditions.

More details can be found in the description section of the video.

About her 2017 composition Apu: Tone Poem for Orchestra she has written:

In Andean Peru, spirits are said to inhabit rocks, rivers, and mountain peaks with the intent of keeping a watchful eye on travelers passing through highland roads. The apu is one of the more well-known spirits that is sometimes portrayed as a minor deity with a mischievous side who is rarely seen. Simple folk song and a solemn prayer often successfully placate the apu to ensure safe passage through the mountains.

Apu: Tone Poem for Orchestra begins with a short folkloric song inspired by the agile ‘pinkillo’ flute, a small slender instrument that packs well into the small bags of travelers who must travel light. It is followed by the extended ‘haillí’ of the second movement, a prayer to the apu, which flows attacca to the third movement in which the apu makes its brief but brilliant and dazzling appearance before disappearing once again into the mountain peaks.”

Conductor Marin Alsop leads an orchestra of young musicians of the National Youth Orchestra of the USA.

Gabriela Lena Frank was born with high-moderate/near-profound hearing loss, and in a fascinating article in the New York Times, she discusses how this has given her insight into the music of Beethoven.

Nicole Lizée (born 1973)

Nicole Lizée was born in Gravelbourg, Saskatchewan, Canada. She received a Master of Music from McGill University and currently lives in Montreal.

Nicole Lizée’s website states that she

creates new music from an eclectic mix of influences including the earliest MTV videos, turntablism, rave culture, Hitchcock, Kubrick, Alexander McQueen, thrash metal, early video game culture, 1960s psychedelia and 1960s modernism. She is fascinated by the glitches made by outmoded and well-worn technology and captures these glitches, notates them and integrates them into live performance.

Nicole’s compositions range from works for orchestra and solo turntablist featuring DJ techniques fully notated and integrated into a concert music setting, to other unorthodox instrument combinations that include the Atari 2600 video game console, omnichords, stylophones, Simon™, vintage board games, and karaoke tapes. In the broad scope of her evolving oeuvre she explores such themes as malfunction, reviving the obsolete, and the harnessing of imperfection and glitch to create a new kind of precision.

As a result, Nicole Lizée’s compositions often incorporate humor into their presentation, and are quite fun to watch as well as listen to. Dancist begins with a film of a man describing a kit he bought to learn about dance music:

Hitchcock Études (a 2014 work “for piano, glitch and film”) involves rearrangements and distortions of scenes and Bernard Hermann’s music from Psycho, The Man Who Knew Too Much, and The Birds:

Nicole Lizée’s 2011 work Death to Kosmische was commissioned by the Kronos Quartet and incorporates prerecorded electronics as well as requiring the musicians to play on a Stylophone (a stylus-operated analog synthesizer invented in 1967), an Omnichord (an electronic instrument introduced in 1981 by Suzuki), and a compact record player.

The word “kosmische” in the title alludes to the phrase “kosmische music” (“cosmic music”) introduced in the liner notes of 1971 Tangerine Dream album Alpha Centauri. The word is defined by the Urban Dictionary as “really, cool, smooth but spaced out in an experimental kind of way.”

Roshanne Etezady (born 1973)

Roshanne Etezady dates her interest in contemporary classical music to seeing the Philip Glass Ensemble on Saturday Night Live in 1986. Prior to that she had studied piano and flute, but then began pursuing composing. She studied at Northwestern University, Yale, and completed her doctorate at the University of Michigan.

Recurring Dreams is a 2017 composition for saxophone and string trio:

The following is an appropriately sparkling orchestral work from 2018 entitled Diamond Rain. At the end of the performance, the composer joins the musicians on stage.

Füsun Köksal (born 1973)

Füsun Köksal was born in Bursa, Turkey. She earned a bachelor’s degree in music theory and composition from the Bilkent University’s Faculty of Music and Performing Arts in Ankara, and subsequently studied composition in Cologne, Germany. She is now working on her PhD at the University of Chicago.

Füsun Köksal composed her String Quartet No. 1 (entitled Of Light and Shadows) between 2006 and 2007. As the title suggests, the music combines enticing (though often elusive) lyricism with passages of Bartokian intensity, including some truly vicious pizzicati:

Sarah Kirkland Snider (born 1973)

Sarah Kirkland Snider was born and raised in Princeton, New Jersey. She began studying piano at age 7, cello at age 10, and sang in choruses as a child and teenager. She has a B.A. from Wesleyan University and an M.M. from the Yale School of Music.

Sarah Kirkland Snider has received many commissions in recent years. On June 10 of this year I saw the world premiere of her orchestral work Forward into Light with the New York Philharmonic. Her music is sometimes categorized as impressionist, but in some works (such as her 2010 song cycle Penelope) she has drawn on an eclectic mix of genres, including pop and rock. She is currently working on an opera about the 12th century composer and mystic Hildegard von Bingen.

Much of Sarah Kirkland Snider’s music that is available on YouTube is for orchestra or chamber ensembles, such as this 2011 composition Pale as Centuries for flute, clarinet, electric guitar, piano, and double bass:

This orchestral work Something for the Dark was commissioned by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, and was inspired by poetry by Detroit artist Philip Levine:

She has also composed for solo piano, such as this work entitled The Currents:

Regarding The Currents, Sarah Kirkland Snider has said that her intent was to write a piece that instead of striving for virtuosity would be “something that challenged the pianist to be at their most expressive, poetic, and lyrical, something that would reward a sharp attention to detail and sensitivity to pacing and narrative.” The title was inspired by a poem by Nathaniel Bellows with the line “But like the hidden current / somewhat undersea / you caused the most upheaval on the other side of me.”

Lera Auerbach (born 1973)

Lera Auerbach was born to a Jewish family in the city of Chelyabinsk in the Ural Mountains of the Soviet Union. She began composing at four years of age but pursued an education and career as a concert pianist. During a 1991 concert tour, she defected to the U.S. She studied piano and composition at Juilliard and comparative literature at Columbia University.

Lera Auerbach has composed two operas (Gogol and The Blind), music for ballet (including The Little Mermaid for the San Francisco Ballet), four symphonies, a piano concerto, four violin concertos (the most recent called Nyx: Fractured Dreams was premiered by the New York Philharmonic in 2017), and ten string quartets, among a variety of other orchestral and chamber music. She continues to perform on piano (YouTube has videos of her playing Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition and the music of other Russian composers), she’s published several books of prose and poetry in both Russian and English, and she creates sculptures in bronze. Her website calls her a “renaissance artist for modern times.”

“I was born to do this, to work in art. I had this feeling when I was four and I had it when I came to New York and faced this big test of my character, skills and talent,” she said in an interview with Jewish Woman magazine.

Her orchestral work Icarus was composed in 2006 and revised in 2011:

Despite her many years in the United States, Lera Auerbach’s music often reveals her heritage as a Russian composer. It’s not so much evident in the beautiful eerie and ethereal opening of her String Quartet No. 10, Frozen Dreams from 2020, but wait for it.

Justine F. Chen (born 1975)

Justine F. Chen was born in Brooklyn and began studying piano, violin, and composition at an early age. She attended Julliard where she received bachelor’s and master’s degrees in violin and composition, and a doctorate in composition.

Her website states: “Always fascinated by the expressive possibilities of dramatic forms, Taiwanese-American composer Justine F. Chen draws inspiration from animation, film, theater, classical Indian dance and music, ballet, and contemporary dance.” She has composed music for solo instruments, chamber ensembles, orchestras, choruses, several short “pocket operas” that range in length from 5 to 25 minutes, and two full-length operas.

Justine Chen’s opera The Life and Death(s) of Alan Turing (to a libretto by David Simpatico) will be premiered by the Chicago Opera Theater in March 2023. The composer and librettist call the opera “a historic-fantasia on Turing’s life.” They have written: “Our opera imagines the man inside the legend of Alan Turing: his unique perspective of the universe, his unabashed view of his homosexuality, and his impact on the future of civilization.”

Here is a too-short excerpt from a concert performance of the scene “Cave of Wonders,” featuring a moving duet between Alan Turing and his doomed childhood friend Christopher Morcom.

Vivian Fung (born 1975)

Vivian Fung was born in Edmonton, Alberta. She received her doctorate from Julliard in 2002 and currently lives in California.

Vivian Fung’s family has roots in Cambodia, and she has travelled to Cambodia, Southwest China, and Bali for her musical explorations. Her music often incorporates influences from other cultures. She has written several concertos, including two violin concertos, a concerto for two violins, a piano concerto, a flute concerto, and a harp concerto. This is her Violin Concerto No. 1 from 2011, which she has said “brings together my influence by non-Western traditional Balinese gamelan music, and my friendship with violinist Kristin Lee":

Among a variety of chamber music, she’s written four string quartets. Here’s her String Quartet No. 3 from 2013 performed by the Attacca Quartet:

About this string quartet she has written:

This work revolves around a chant that is first realized in full about a minute into the piece. Evoking non-Western song, the chant is announced by the entire quartet, highly ornamented, powerful, and tuned to suggest the microtonal tendencies found in many non-Western scales. My recent reflections on faith and spirituality come to life in this quartet as a world of varied prayers, sometimes turbulent, sometimes passionate, sung to oneself or among a crowd.

A few of her works use electronics, including this unusual 2018 composition entitled The Ice is Talking, which is played on a block of ice:

She has written how she saw glaciers in the Columbia Icefield as a child, and how a recent visit revealed how the glaciers have since receded. This composition

is an emotional reaction to that experience…. At the start, it is a celebration of the elements, taking in the beauty of a blade gliding through ice, the taps and swishes of ice being shaped into virtuosic rhythmic patterns that speak through interjections by the performer. As the piece progresses, the piece becomes more and more violent, and the instruments reflect the rage and intensity of the protagonist, with a power drill, ice picks and stabbing motions reflecting the realization of human’s ill effects on the natural landscape. It ends with dramatic flair in the hope of raising awareness to the world around us.

Caroline Mallonée (born 1975)

Caroline Mallonée studied composition at the Royal Conservatory of the Hague, earned a B.A. at Harvard, and an M.M. at the Yale School of Music. She is based in Buffalo, New York.

Caroline Mallonée has written music for choruses, orchestras, and various instrumental ensembles. Her series of works called String Tunes are for solo and ensemble string instruments that are retuned or tuned in just intonation. Her website states:

Caroline Mallonee’s music is inspired by scientific phenomena, visual art, and musical puzzles. At once systematic and intuitive in her compositional approach, she writes chamber and orchestral music that revels in the timbral palette available to the contemporary composer.

One of her most popular works is a string quartet called The Butterfly Effect, which uses retuned strings, just intonation, electronics (or off-stage ensemble), and rainsticks. There are several performances on YouTube, but this one at the Brooklyn performance venue National Sawdust features some introductory remarks by the composer.

Paola Prestini (born 1975)

Paola Prestini was born in Italy, graduated from the Julliard School, and currently resides in Brooklyn. She is much involved with working with children in the arts and cofounded the Brooklyn performance space National Sawdust.

Her 2018 composition From the Bones to the Fossils (for solo cello, loop pedal, and electronics) arose from a commission that involved composers working with scientists, in this case the climate scientist Andrew Kruczkiewicz. Paola Prestini commissioned a paper from him about hurricane patterns in the Caribbean and Cuba in the 1950s, the music of which (as she writes)

is infused in the vocal-like writing for the cello. I then used recorded fog horns, storms, ocean sounds and my own voice to create the electronic tapestry created with Sxip Shirey. I took the idea of currents and their overlap as the departing point for the cello’s lines and loops, landing in culmination at the eye of the storm, then dissolving into Andrew’s ending words, ‘from the bones to the fossils’.

From the Bones to the Fossils is performed here by Paola Prestini’s husband, Jeffrey Zeigler in connection with Bang on a Can:

Following the performance is a discussion with the composer and the Bang on a Can founders.

Theresa Wong (born 1976)

Theresa Wong is first generation Chinese-American born in Schenectady, New York. She studied classical piano and cello from an early age but studied product design as an undergraduate at Stanford University, and then earned an MFA at Mills College.

Her website states: “Embracing multiplicity, Wong’s artistic practice follows inquiries into song forms, improvisation, just intonation, and multi-media performance.” Much of her music is improvised on cello, often includes voice, and often involves collaboration with others. She participated in Ellen Fullman’s long-string composition Harbors that is featured in her entry in this project.

This is the first of five YouTube videos of solo cello improvisation performed by Theresa Wong in March 2018. In this one, she’s able to play cello glissandi (sometimes combined with voice) to make it seem as if the cello is speaking, albeit in an alien language!

Theresa Wong also composes in more traditional frameworks. Here is a 2019 world premiere by Sarah Cahill of a Theresa Wong piano work She Dances Naked Under Palm Trees:

The title is based on a line in the poem “No Images” by Harlem Renaissance poet Waring Cuney, as set to music by Nina Simone.

Suzanne Farrin (born 1976)

Suzanne Farrin was born in Maine and holds a doctorate from Yale University. Besides composing, she also performs on the ondes Martenot (a keyboard variation of the theremin).

Suzanne Farrin’s 45-minute opera Dolce la morte (“Sweet Death”) from 2016 is composed for countertenor and chamber ensemble. It is based on the love poetry of Michelangelo precipitated by his 1532 meeting with a young Roman nobleman named Tommaso de’ Cavalieri. The composer writes “Though the details of their relationship are unknown, we know that the meeting inspired the artist to compose intense poetry that deals with the joy and complexity of carnal desire and spiritual fulfilment.”

This is the “Prisoner Poems” section towards the end of Dolce la morte. The title alludes to the four unfinished statues (sometimes called “Prisoners”) that now stand before the statue of David in Florence. It is sung by Anthony Roth Costanzo with bassoon accompaniment by Rebekah Heller.

Suzanne Farrin’s 2016 composition The Stimulus of Loss is here performed by the great flautist Claire Chase with pre-recorded ondes Martenot:

This Mind Made War is for two vibraphones:

Tanya Ekanayaka (1977)

Tanya Ekanayaka was born in Sri Lanka and began studying piano with her mother at the age of five. She made her public debut at twelve and performed a Mozart Piano Concerto with the Symphony Orchestra of Sri Lanka at sixteen. She has a BA in English literature and linguistics from the University of Peradeniya, a Master of Science from the University of Edinburgh, and a Doctorate from there for her interdisciplinary research in linguistics and musicology.

Tanya Ekanayaka composes exclusively for solo piano and performs her own music. According to her website, “her compositions are entirely unscored but instead reside naturally and precisely frozen in her memory once evolved.” This is her 2010 composition Adahas: of Wings of Roots:

Du Yun (born 1977)

Du Yun was born in Shanghai. She began studying piano at the age of four and attended the Shanghai Conservatory of Music. After moving to the United States, she attended the Oberlin Conservatory of Music and Harvard University, where she earned a PhD in composition.

Du Yun has a background in western pop music as well as Chinese pop music and folk music, and she mixes musical genres, art, and video with ecstatic abandon. She has composed for varieties of instrumentation, including electronic music, and leads the art-pop band OK Miss. She enjoys challenging herself and prefers not being too comfortable when she creates music. She has compared her process of composition with free climbing. Her second opera Angel’s Bone — about a pair of angels who are forced into spiritual and sexual slavery — won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in Music.

This is a string quartet composed in 2018 entitled i am my own achilles’ heel:

About this work Du Yun has written:

I am always fascinated by a fantastical world that lies in a reality, a liminal state that lies at the edge of half fantastical, half hallucination. Years go by, I am told this could be a condition and there is a term for this condition: it is the world of Alice in Wonderland Syndrome.

According to the medical journal, although the cause of Alice in Wonderland Syndrome is unknown, the condition typically accompanies episodes of migraines. Affected individuals report feeling that different parts of their body are disproportionate in size and proximity and that their overall surroundings are “warped.” Specifically, these patients perceive objects as larger or smaller than they really are, thereby earning the syndrome its characteristic name.

The Rest is Our World is a short 2020 composition for harp and voice:

The harpist satisfies Du Yun’s instructions to be “on the lawn / balcony / porch / hallway / woods / mountain / pond / or any public space.”

Du Yun’s 2010 composition A Cockroach’s Tarantella is for string quartet and narrator, who discusses her life as a cockroach and particularly the mating and procreation implications. This film by Julian Crouch provides what might be perhaps a little too much visualization for some viewers.

Du Yun herself is the narrator and images of her face appear in the video.

Tomeka Reid (born 1977)

Tomeka Reid grew up outside of Washington D.C. and started playing cello in the 4th grade. She earned a Bachelor of Music degree from the University of Maryland in 2000, received a Master of Music at DePaul University in Chicago, and a doctorate in jazz studies from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign in 2017.

Tomeka Reid’s website identifies her as “Cellist, Composer, Educator.” She was introduced to jazz while an undergraduate, and later discovered the rich jazz scene in Chicago. That is the world in which she has made her greatest musical impact. She has played on some 30 jazz albums along with artists such as Anthony Braxton and Roscoe Mitchell, and in 2015 she founded the Tomeka Reid Quartet, which combines her cello with drums, bass, and guitar.

She has also composed music for others to perform. Her composition Prospective Dwellers was featured in her entry in the Month of Black Composers.

Her first work for solo piano is Lamenting G.F., A.A., B.T., T.M. from 2020, which she composed for Bang on a Can’s Vicky Chow. The initials refer to George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and Tony McDade, and the first letters of their names were used to generate some of the musical material. This is one of four performances of Lamenting by Vicky Chow available on YouTube:

Lamenting was described in a concert program note like this:

This work requires the pianist’s mastery of varied techniques, including pummeling and plucking the strings inside the instrument. Lamenting segues into a mad, virtuosic swing on the keyboard, and concludes with a stately, classical dirge. In just a few minutes, it is a powerful invocation and tribute to the senseless police killing of Black lives.

Anna Thorvaldsdottir (born 1977)

Anna Sigríður Þorvaldsdóttir, whose name is frequently spelled Anna Thorvaldsdottir, grew up in Bogarnes, a small town on the south-west coast of Iceland characterized by a landscape of mountains and the ocean that continues to inform her music. She studied composition at the University of California, San Diego, where she earned her MA and PhD. She is currently based in the London area and is composer-in-residence with the Iceland Symphony Orchestra.

Anna Thorvaldsdottir has written music for solo instruments and chamber ensembles, and sometimes does installations that involve lights as well as music, but her preferred medium is the orchestra for its wide variety of sounds and textures. She has sought to bring out the musical qualities in nature, but not in a 19th century romantic view. Instead, her music suggests the rhythms of the natural world as well as stasis, tectonic shifts as well as fragile crumbling structures.

Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s 2011 orchestral work Aeriality consists of (in her words) “vast sound-textures combined — and contrasted with — various forms of lyrical material.”

She continues:

AERIALITY refers to the state of gliding through the air with nothing or little to hold on to – as if flying – and the music both portrays the feeling of absolute freedom gained from the lack of attachment and the feeling of unease generated by the same circumstances. The title draws its essence from various aspects of the meaning of the word “aerial” and refers to the visual inspiration that such a view provides. AERIALITY is also a play with words, combining the words “aerial” and “reality”, so as to suggest two different worlds; “reality”, the ground, and “aerial”, the sky or the untouchable.

AERIALITY can be said to be on the border of symphonic music and sound art. Parts of the work consist of thick clusters of sounds that form a unity as the instruments of the orchestra stream together to form a single force – a sound-mass. The sense of individual instruments is somewhat blurred and the orchestra becomes a single moving body, albeit at times forming layers of streaming materials that flow between different instrumental groups. These chromatic layers of materials are extended by the use of quartertones to generate vast sonic textures. At what can perhaps be said to be the climax in the music, a massive sustained ocean of quartertones slowly accumulates and is then released into a brief lyrical field that almost immediately fades out at the peak of its own urgency, only to remain a shadow.

The score of her 2017 orchestral composition Metacosmos includes the following instructions to the musicians:

My music is written as an ecosystem of materials that are carried from one performer — or performers — to the next throughout the process of the work. As you play a phrase, harmony, texture or a lyrical line it is being delivered to you, passed on from another performer — performers — for you to carry on until it is delivered to another. All materials grow in and out of each other, growing and transforming throughout the process.

When you see a long sustained pitch, think of it as a fragile flower that you need to carry in your hands and walk the distance on a thin rope without dropping it or falling. It is a way of measuring time and noticing the tiny changes that happen as you walk further along the same thin rope. Absolute tranquility with the necessary amount of concentration needed to perform the task.

Paula Matthusen (born 1978)

Paula Matthusen was born in Arizona and is currently Associate Professor of Music at Wesleyan University where (according to her website), “she teaches experimental music, composition, and music technology.”

Paula Matthusen has written music for conventional instruments (such as Prophecy in Reverse which I saw in its world premiere in March 2022 performed by the American Composers Orchestra), but many of her works involve electronics. She has also made sound installations and collaborated with choreographers and theater companies.

This is a 2018 composition entitled by the inexplicabilities we call coincidence for prepared piano and miniature electronics. The title is from the book The Faraway Nearby by Rebecca Solnit. The work was commissioned by the pianist Kathleen Supové and uses field recordings made at the Chapman School in Supové’s hometown of Portland, Oregon, of the migratory Vaux’s swifts and other ambient sounds.

About this composition, Paula Matthusen writes:

I was intrigued by the idea of finding unusual resonances, and decided to place these field recordings as well as slowed down recordings of the vaux swifts inside the piano. Two fixed media tracks work together – one resonating the interior of the piano, and then the second articulating the exterior world of the piano by playing through a conventional stereo playback system. The pianist navigates between these two worlds, playing a very slow melodic line on a zither placed inside the piano utilizing a handheld fan. The sound source of the handheld fan is to be obscured from the audience, allowing for a mysterious blend between the timbral worlds inside and outside of the instrument.

The following is a 2019 composition for vibraphone and electronics entitled For these things that can be told / until mystery becomes elegy. The video’s description contains more details on its creation and execution:

Kamala Sankaram (born 1978)

Kamala Sankaram was born in Orange County, California. She began learning piano as a child but gravitated towards other interests, including musical theater. She has a B.A. in Liberal Arts from Sarah Lawrence College and a Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology from the New School for Social Research.

Kamala Sankaram’s music is a delightful mix of influences, including pop, rock, and Indian classical and pop music. She sings, plays accordion, and is the leader of Bombay Rickey, an “operatic Bollywood surf ensemble.”

Since 2012, Kamala Sankaram has composed 11 operas ranging in length from 10 minutes to 90 minutes. Her one-act opera “Taking Up Serpents” was commissioned by the Washington National Opera and will be performed this summer at the Glimmerglass Festival. (I’ll be seeing it today, August 1, 2022.)

This is Kamala Sankaram’s all decisions will be made by consensus, billed as the “world’s first Zoom opera” and performed live on April 25, 2020. Kamala Sankaram is singing the character Linski and composer Joan La Barbara is Stiller:

Kamala Sankaram’s composition 60 Words (2014/2016) is for string quartet or accordion quartet, and begins with the whispered text for the legal justification of military force by the United States military since 9/11:

The composer is on the far right and in the preview image.

The Tree is a haunting 2019 composition for piano, violin, viola, cello, clarinet, flute, and prerecorded testimonies of women:

Anna Clyne (born 1980)

Anna Clyne was born in London and began composing at the age of 11. She earned a Bachelor of Music from the University of Edinburgh and an MA in music from the Manhattan School of Music.

Anna Clyne’s music is generally tonal, often quite lyrical, and can be quite rhythmically vigorous. She has composed music for orchestra, choruses, chamber ensembles, and solo instruments, sometimes combined with electronics, and has collaborated with choreographers, visual artists, and filmmakers. She sometimes has the musicians hum, sing, and stomp their feet. In a performance of her Restless Oceans I saw in March, the musicians stand up at the end in joyful defiance and unity.

Within Her Arms is a beautiful 2009 – 2009 composition for string orchestra that Anna Clyne wrote as an elegy to her mother:

Sound and Fury (2019) for chamber orchestra was inspired by Haydn’s Symphony No. 60 and Shakespeare’s Macbeth:

An extended discussion of this work is available on the Boosey & Hawkes website.

This is a recent composition by Anna Clyne called In the Gale for cello and birdsong performed by Yo-Yo Ma accompanied by birds.

Lucrecia Dalt (born 1980)

Lucrecia Dalt was born in Pereira, Colombia. Prior to her music career, she studied civil engineering and worked in the field of geotechnics. She currently lives in Berlin.

I first became aware of Lucrecia Dalt through her music for the 2022 HBO comedy-horror series The Baby. Since 2005, she has released seven solo albums of her music (with an 8th coming in October), which has evolved from rather tame dance and pop music to more challenging and experimental electro-acoustic compositions. A profile on the website of her booking agency states:

Dalt often seeks inspiration in the worlds of fiction, poetry, geology and desire, excavating nuanced references to untangle and respond to in her music. At times, this exploratory impulse surfaces like an introspective call and response experiment with her source material, forming new perspectives on ideas rooted in Colombian mythology to German New Wave cinema. Dalt’s conceptual blueprints are intimate and intricate, emerging like cyanotypes cast in the sun. Around these frameworks she shapes her sound, using analogue instrumentation, a vast array of synthesizers and the processed glow of her voice.

This is a music video for “Tar” from her 2018 album Anticlines:

Cheryl Frances-Hoad (born 1980)

Cheryl Frances-Hoad was born in Essex, England, and studied at the Yehudi Menuhin School, the University of Cambridge (for her BA in Music and an MPhil in Composition), and Kings College London, where she earned her PhD in Composition.

My Fleeting Angel for piano trio was composed in 2005 and is based on a short story by Sylvia Plath entitled “The Wishing Box” about the separate dream lives of a husband and wife. It has three movements: a slow Larghetto, a scherzo-like Allegro Spiritoso that incorporates Bulgarian rhythms, and a waltz-like finale that Cheryl Frances-Hoad has said represents “the confusion of emotions” that a reader might experience at the end of Plath’s story.

The always interesting and inventive Merz Trio has combined Cheryl Frances-Hoad’s My Fleeting Angel with their own arrangement of O Fiery Spirit by Hildegard von Bingen, fluidly leaping over an period of 900 years.

Jocelyn Hagen (born 1980)

Jocelyn Hagen was born in Minneapolis and raised in North Dakota. She began piano studies with her mother, was soon able to accompany choir practices, and began composing. She earned a Bachelor of Music from St. Olaf College, and an M.A. in composition from the University of Minnesota.

Jocelyn Hagen’s music includes much for choruses, but also for solo instruments (piano and cello), chamber ensembles, and sometimes orchestra. Her largest work is amass (2007 – 2011) for chorus, soloists, cellos, guitar, and percussion, which incorporates spiritual texts from many of the world’s religions.

Her 2011 composition Moon Goddess is for women’s voices, four-hand piano, buffalo drum, finger cymbals, and suspended cymbal with a text translated from Enheduanna, a 23rd century BC Sumerian priestess of the moon. This is a stirring music video of Moon Goddess created by students of the Centennial High School Bella Voce Choir of Las Cruces, New Mexico in lieu of live performances during COVID isolation:

Her 2019 multimedia symphony The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci is for choir and orchestra with an immersive video component. Here is an excerpt called “The Greatest Good” performed by a chorus performing virtually:

Dobrinka Tabakova (born 1980)

Dobrinka Tabakova was born in Plovdiv, Bulgaria, and moved to London when she was 11. She studied at the Royal Academy of Music in London, graduated from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, and earned a Ph.D. in composition from King’s College, London.

This five-movement Suite in Old Style (2006) for viola, harpsichord, and strings is an homage to the French Baroque and Rameau:

The composer writes that “this suite presents glimpses from everyday life at an 18th century aristocratic household: hunting, courting in the gardens, dancing and entertaining in opulent surroundings.” The outer movements are delightful in their evocations of the Baroque, yet it is the long slow middle movement (“the rose garden by moonlight”) that seems to me the emotional nostalgic core of the work.

Her 2007 work Dawn for solo violin and cello with string orchestra is the first of three compositions making up a Dawn-Day-Dusk triptych.

Missy Mazzoli (born 1980)

Missy Mazzoli was born in Lansdale, Pennsylvania. She attended Boston University of Fine Arts (receiving a bachelor’s degree), the Yale School of Music (a master’s degree), and the Royal Conservatory of the Hague.

Missy Mazzoli has composed three full-length operas including the highly acclaimed Breaking the Waves (2016) based on the Lars von Trier movie. She has composed and performed music for the fictional character Thomas Pembridge in the TV series Mozart in the Jungle, and she founded the electro-acoustic band Victoire to perform her music.

In this performance of Vespers for Violin (2014) for amplified violin and electronics, Jennifer Koh is on the violin and Missy Mazzoli handles the electronics:

Here’s a 2015 string quartet entitled Quartet for Queen Mab:

About the Quartet for Queeen Mab, the composer has written:

Queen Mab is an elusive creature from folklore and literature, a tiny fairy who drives her chariot into the nose of sleeping people. She enters their brain, eliciting dreams of his or her heart’s desire. This quartet embraces the wildness of Queen Mab’s journey and the dreams that result; Baroque ornaments twist around long legato lines and melodies ricochet between players. The music follows a sort of intuitive dream logic but returns again and again to the opening material, resulting in a sort of insistent, insane ritornello.

One of Missy Mazzoli’s most popular pieces of orchestral music is Sinfornia (for Orbiting Spheres), originally composed for the Los Angeles Philharmonic in a chamber version in 2014 and revised for full orchestra for the Boulder Philharmonic in 2016:

Two percussionists play a vibraphone, marimba, suspended cymbal, opera gong, lion’s roar, glockenspiel, melodica, snare drum, spring coil, and boom box. A pianist also plays a synthesizer, and some of the musicians also play harmonicas.

Missy Mazzoli writes:

Sinfonia (for Orbiting Spheres) is music in the shape of a solar system, a collection of rococo loops that twist around each other within a larger orbit. The word “sinfonia” refers to baroque works for chamber orchestra but also to the old Italian term for a hurdy-gurdy, a medieval stringed instrument with constant, wheezing drones that are cranked out under melodies played on an attached keyboard. It’s a piece that churns and roils, that inches close to the listener only to leap away at breakneck speed, in the process transforming the ensemble turns into a makeshift hurdy-gurdy, flung recklessly into space.

Angélica Negrón (born 1981)

Angélica Negrón was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico. She studied piano and violin at the Conservatory of Music in Puerto Rico, earned a master’s degree at New York University, and is working on a doctorate in composition at City University of New York, where she has studied with composer Tania León. She currently lives in Brooklyn.

Angélica Negrón has written music for orchestras, choirs, and chamber ensembles, but also for accordions, robotic instruments, toys, and electronics. She has composed music for over a dozen documentaries and founded Balún, a band variously described as “indie dream-pop” and “tropical electronic.” Here’s a sample with vocals by the composer:

Her 2020 composition Marejada for string quartet and electronics was created with COVID isolation in mind. Here it is here performed by the Kronos Quartet:

Lucy Pankhurst (born 1981)

Lucy Pankhurst is based in the northwest of England. She is a graduate of the Royal Northern College of Music in both performance (tenor horn) and composition, and in 2020 earned her PhD for her studies on contemporary applications of the traditional brass band.

Lucy Pankhurst is an advocate of the brass band and has written a program of music for brass students that YouTube searches will confirm is quite popular. Her project Puzzle Pieces for music students is a collection of works that can be played by a flexible array of instruments of various levels of difficulty.

Lucy Pankhurst’s recent work “Welcome to the Bandroom” combines music written for Foden’s Band and narration by Tom Redmond intended to highlight the various instruments of the brass band:

Don’t know the difference between a tuba and a euphonium, or a cornet and a flugel horn? This is the video for you!

Here’s a more traditional composition called Kokopelli for a trio of flutes:

Jessie Montgomery (born 1981)

Jessie Montgomery is one of today’s most popular young composers. She was born in the Lower East Side of Manhattan to parents involved with the arts and activism, and she credits that background for fostering “a life that merges composing, performance, education, and advocacy.”

Jessie Montgomery began studying violin at the Third Street Music School Settlement on 11th Street in the East Village, earned a bachelor’s degree in violin from Julliard and a master’s degree in Composition for Film and Multimedia from NYU. She is currently a Graduate Fellow in Composition at Princeton, and Professor of violin and composition at The New School.

Jessie Montgomery has written music for orchestra, chamber ensembles, choruses, solo violin and viola, and voice, including settings of spirituals. Her music often touches upon social and political concerns. Her orchestral composition Banner was written on the 200th anniversary of the Star Spangled Banner but also incorporates the theme from “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” commonly referred to as the Black National Anthem.

This is a performance of her string quartet Strum (2006, rev. 2012) by students at the University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre & Dance:

She has written:

Within Strum I utilized texture motives, layers of rhythmic or harmonic ostinati that string together to form a bed of sound for melodies to weave in and out. The strumming pizzicato serves as a texture motive and the primary driving rhythmic underpinning of the piece. Drawing on American folk idioms and the spirit of dance and movement, the piece has a kind of narrative that begins with fleeting nostalgia and transforms into ecstatic celebration.

Jessie Montgomery composed her Rhapsody No.1 for solo violin in 2014 and later transcribed it for viola. Here’s the original version:

The composer writes writes:

Rhapsody No. 1 is the first solo piece I wrote for myself. It draws on inspiration from the Eugène Ysaÿe solo works and is intended to serve as both an étude and a stand-alone work. This piece is intended to be part of a set of 6 solo works, each of which will be inspired by an historical composer.

Charlotte Bray (born 1982)

Charlotte Bray (born 1982) was born in Oxford and grew up in High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire. She studied cello and composition and earned a Masters in Composition from the Royal College of Music. She has written music for orchestra, chamber ensembles, solo instruments, and the voice, and currently lives in Berlin.

Caught in Treetop (2010) is a violin concerto for chamber ensemble:

Those Secret Eyes is a piano trio from 2014, performed here by the Merz Trio:

The composer describes the composition as

loosely inspired by Shakespeare’s Macbeth, and principally the play’s female characters: Lady Macbeth and the Witches. Set at night, it holds dark undercurrents of suspicion, sin, superstition, and mistrust. Governed by the principal themes of appearance and reality, and ambition and guilt, the piece is driven by a cruel, dry energy.

The scheming, tightly wound opening, strings playing single sul ponticello lines punctuated by the piano, seems as if they are conspiring together and daring each other. The plot thickens with the music becoming faster, more excitable and heavier. Even the melodic lines before the climax are unsettlingly cold and calculated. We wind up back to similar material seen at the opening, as if this short meeting has come to a close, the veiled agenda set.

Wang Lu (born 1982)

Wang Lu graduated from the Beijing Central Conservatory of Music and earned a doctoral degree in composition from Columbia University. She is currently an Associate Professor of Music at Brown University.

Her website states:

Composer and pianist Wang Lu writes music that reflects a very natural identification with influences from urban environmental sounds, linguistic intonation and contours, traditional Chinese music and freely improvised traditions, through the prism of contemporary instrumental techniques and new sonic possibilities.

Her 2015 composition Urban Inventory is for flute, clarinet, piano, electronic keyboard (tuned a quarter-tone low), violin, cello and recorded sounds:

She describes it like this:

When the evening air finally overtakes the smog at day’s end, a city’s exhausted population comes out for relief. Scenes of leisurely and nonchalant chatting, strolling, dancing, tai-chi, dog- and kid-walking. Sounds of broken instruments, mixed with songs of praise to western and eastern gods. Historical and recent memories creep back into consciousness: fantasies of early propagandist dance troupe goddesses, the unmistakably beguiling voice of a 90s pop icon (杨钰莹), a peasant rap sensation clamoring for a skateboard, the monotone of a rural poetess and her desire to escape her dreadful situation. And at dawn, these suddenly animated voices retreat back into the minds of those who will return to the lifelessness of their urban routine.

The six movements are titled:

1. city park
2. once upon a time, in another lifetime (at 3:20 in this performance)
3. (dream of the) red detachment
4. gifts of gab (at 7:55)
5. two voices of the people (10:15)
6. tell you softly (11:44)

Although the title of the 3rd movement appears in program notes for the composition, I’m not certain how it corresponds to any music.

Like Clockwork is a 2020 composition for violin, viola, cello, piano, and percussion. Here is the premiere, performed remotely:

This is generally a gentle work but with a surprising drum solo about a third of the way through and an even more surprising honky-tonkish section towards the end kicked off by the pianist.

Caroline Shaw (born 1982)

Caroline Shaw was born in Greenville, North Carolina. She began learning piano under her mother’s instruction at the age of two, and started composing at ten. She received a Bachelor of Music for violin from Rice University, a master’s degree in violin from Yale, and is currently working on her PhD in composition from Princeton.

Her website states: “Caroline Shaw is a musician who moves among roles, genres, and mediums, trying to imagine a world of sound that has never been heard before but has always existed.” Although she has written music for orchestras and chamber ensembles, much of her music is for voice, and she is often seen singing in her own compositions.

In 2013 Caroline Shaw became the youngest person every to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Music for her exhilerating Partita for 8 Voices for eight unaccompanied singers:

The composer is the one with the striped shirt. The four movements are Allemande, Sarabande, Courate, and Passacaglia, the names of dances often used in Baroque suites.

Here is Entr’acte for string orchestra, a 2014 arrangement of her 2011 string quartet:

And here is Caroline Shaw singing her 2018 song “And So” to a mashup of lyrics by herself, Robert Burns, Gertrude Stein, and Billy Joel, accompanied by the Attacca Quartet.

Ready for More?

To continue chronologically, go to A Final Month of Women Composers.